A new study from UCSB finds significant increases in businesses hiring organized shills to push products online. These 'malicious crowd-sourcing systems' enlist dozens or hundreds of professional shills to orchestrate mass account creation, generate bogus ratings, and post canned cut-and-paste positive reviews -- with each 'task' costing between 13 and 70 cents. 'Unscrupulous crowd-sourcing sites, coupled with international payment systems, have enabled a burgeoning crowdturfing market that targets U.S. websites, but is fueled by a global workforce.'

It actually generates problems for the marketing people themselves as well. Collecting direct and wide feedback on new products (both own and from competitors) is essential for any consumer oriented company.

For market research purposes the estimate is nowadays that somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of all product reviews or opinions left on the web are non-authentic.

That is not just a problem for consumers wanting to learn more about a product, but also for the companies making the products and needing actual user feedback for their product development.

Based on text analysis (repeating pattern, word distribution and use) it is somewhat possible to filter out or at least estimate the percentage of the non-authentic responses. But the influence of those non-authentic responses on the actual user opinions is so big, that in effect they become useless to gather any data.

Since a few years there is actually a return to traditional channel marketing efforts -- talk to real people. Unless you're among the biggest players in a market, sadly it's almost impossible to end on top in this new astroturf playground.